A call center is a facility for handling incoming voice calls from customers or potential customers of a business or organization. Typically, a call center is staffed with a number of agents, often located in the same office, that are representatives of a business and have access to information about the business or about existing customers of that business. One function of the call center is to handle customer service inquiries from customers. Although many customer service inquiries can be handled by email or by publishing information online, for some businesses, a call center may be regarded as necessary. Customers of banks, for example, often prefer to speak to a live person when resolving service issues.
Call centers tend to be the target of fraud. For example, existing call centers sometimes validate or authenticate customers using basic information, such as account number, phone number, address, date of birth, and the last four digits of a Social Security number. Often this information is available to a sufficiently motivated perpetrator seeking to fraudulently gain access to information about an account. Further, contact centers are susceptible to social engineering techniques, where a small amount of information about an account is used by a perpetrator to gain access to additional information about the account. Publicly-available information, along with other information gained through social engineering techniques, may be sufficient to enable a person not authorized to access information about an account to persuade a call center agent that he or she is the authorized user on the account.